/ 13 October 2006

Last hurrah for that other cup?

Amid all the optimistic diagnoses and happy anticipation that usher in major international cricket tournaments, it has been easy to forget that the Champions Trophy, already in its second week, is mortally ill and dangerously short of well-wishers.

Indeed, players, pundits and sponsors have been queuing for over two years to pull the plug on its life-support; and one more dip in its chart might give them the excuse they’ve been waiting for.

Not that most need an excuse. The ugly stepsister of the World Cup has been waning almost since its inception in 1998, when South Africa lifted the first trophy under the steamy, midge-spangled lights of Dhaka; and it’s not hard to see why.

B-teams hastily cobbled together to honour grudging commitments, naive scheduling and interminable round-robin garbage (the blood of the minnows is not yet dry in India) have all conspired toward an infamous reputation, the final insult being provided by the English edition in 2004, where England shirts were banned because team sponsor Vodafone was a rival of one of the neo-fascist trough-humpers (they prefer ”corporate partners”) who own the game.

Graeme Smith’s team must be less than delighted that it has to go and fanny about in pyjamas in the dust shortly before two very grown-up Test series at home against Pakistan and India.

Still, after the assault on and battery of the neighbouring Under-20 Social Fifth Team (they prefer ”Zimbabwe”) one can’t help looking forward to real one-day cricket with guilty pleasure. It may be drivel, jammed into the calendar to swell coffers, but at least for an hour or two it will be fairly diverting drivel, rather like a pastoral Adam Sandler film.

Naturally, much of this pleasure stems from the arbitrariness of victory and defeat in one-day cricket. Any of the top six teams can win it, which is why Brian Lara’s murmurings about retaining the trophy aren’t necessarily hallucinatory.

Indeed, the inevitably flat wickets will remove the advantage of the technically sounder teams (the West Indians can tee off, feet planted and eyes shut, with cavalier abandon), and any pace from thoroughbred quickies early in the innings will almost certainly be blunted. These are prospects that are, shamefully, mouth-watering.

But naturally sanity will prevail. The West Indies are about to lose their talisman, as Lara heads into early middle-age, and India have just had theirs returned. With Sachin Tendulkar restored to them, a week of intense inter-squad practice matches and overwhelming crowd support, the hosts must be favourites.

However, not all contenders in this week’s matches need to worry about the grim prospects of success; and the weight of expectation has rarely ridden as lightly on South African shoulders. The recent cull of trans-Zambezi baby seals aside, the Proteas will be lucky to reach the semi-finals, and coach Mickey Arthur seems to be in a healthily inventive frame of mind, stressing the importance of rotation in the squad.

Unfortunately for him, rotating a squad of 14 frontline players seems to be less about genuine experimentation than reshuffling batting orders; and realistically, all he can hope to do is to take some of the strain off Makhaya Ntini’s hamstrings and Jacques Kallis’s elbows.

The thinking behind handing Arthur and Smith a full-strength squad seems relatively solid. Competing at the World Cup will require a bonded, battle-tested unit, with each member of the squad comfortable in his specific role and with a clear view of the campaign map.

Furthermore, supporters of this selectorial overkill might say, it is a squad with impressive depth: seven of the 14 are bowlers who have turned the course of at least one limited-overs international. Smith can also turn his arm over in an emergency, and Robin Peterson, well, Peterson can cause the emergency that gets his skipper into the game.

Hardly an embarrassment of bowling riches, one might argue, but nevertheless it seems difficult to deny that this is a squad likely to withstand what is threatening to be a summer of attrition. Come May 2007, the winners will be the last men — or man — standing.

But look beyond those half-dozen strapping scrappers, and one sees the same terrible fragility that has kept the Proteas pinned in the mediocre middle of the world one-day rankings. The fast-medium brigade may be ardent team blokes, but the only class in this act is Ntini. He came into this season wrapped in gossamer, and if he gets crocked — even just faintly crocked — before April, South Africa’s World Cup campaign is doomed.

Suddenly the overkill squad doesn’t look quite so clever. Suddenly one has to ask whether it wouldn’t have been a better idea to take a young bowling attack of no-name urchins to India, perhaps led by a tribal patriarch in the person of Shaun Pollock.

At worst they would have come home beaten but vastly wiser, having learned at the knee of the master in the most vivid and intense of classrooms. At best one of them might have winkled out Tendulkar, and been content to die young.

Perhaps this is naive; but it is undeniable that South African cricket has only one goal at the moment, and that goal does not involve winning the Champions Trophy. No, the entire national programme right now must be focused solely towards two ends: saving the bodies of every bowler in the squad over the age of 28 — which is almost all of them — and blooding potential reserves for when those bodies inevitably break.

Which makes the omission of spinner Thandi Tshabalala all the more perplexing. Slugger Goolam Bodi must feel faintly aggrieved at being overlooked, given his performance for the Titans against South Africa three weeks ago, in which he pulled the underpants of the full-strength Proteas attack over its head and stuffed it into a locker; but Tshabalala would be forgiven for being aghast.

A tournament in India, South Africa wretchedly short of slow-bowling options, a viciously long summer ahead, and they take six fast bowlers … Oi veh.

But then again, when was the short game ever supposed to be sensible? And so for now perhaps it is best simply to say goodbye to Lara, hello to Tendulkar, au revoir to earnest cricket, and to enjoy the whole whooping panjandrum for what it is. We might not get another chance.